“You’ll excuse my being in a hurry,” he said, and added with a smile, “such old friends as we are need not stand upon ceremony, need we? I seem to have known you for years, Warnock. Let me see—I come your way for a little and then branch off. Come along, I want to reach a certain camping-ground before dark.”
We parted where a fallen tree spanned a branch of the river. With one foot on this bridge he extended his hand to me.
“Good-bye, Warnock,” he said, wringing my hand and giving me a lingering farewell look. “If I succeed by the ‘way of the spider’ and you by the ‘way of the fish,’ we shall meet up there”—he pointed towards the mountains—“if not, then up there!” And with a movement of his head he indicated the clear blue sky.
I stood and watched him as he entered the bush on the other side of the stream, and then turned with a sigh to make my way back to the pa.
“My perfect man and my perfect woman may never even meet, much less mingle,” I said to myself. “Perhaps he will find the marble Hinauri, and then come down to earth again wedded for ever to this ideal and clothe its sublime meaning in a poem which will raise the level of the world.… and perhaps I—who can tell?——”
I dared not conclude my sentence, for beside my perfect man I felt too poor a thing to deserve the love of my perfect woman.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE DREAD MAKUTU.[23]
On the morning of the third day after our arrival at the pa we set out for the Table Land. Te Makawawa proposed that ‘the little maiden,’ whom he treated with a consideration and a quiet, dignified respect that almost amounted to worship and awe, should be carried in a kind of litter by slaves, but Crystal would not hear of it. She assured the chief she could travel twenty miles a day on foot, and Grey himself laughed at the idea of her being carried on a litter. Accordingly, as we had ample time to travel by easy stages, she walked on equal terms with the rest of us. Our party consisted of seven—we three pakehas, the chief, Tiki, and two slaves, who carried blankets and provisions. Grey and I insisted on bearing our own swags.
The aged chief went before us with a swinging stride, and very soon we struck a path which he knew: it was the very one he had often travelled between the pa and the Great Tapu in the early days when he had been guardian priest of the ancient temple. This path simplified our journey, and there was no such thing as battling with supple-jacks or struggling through fern breast high.
They held happy hours for me, those three days in the bush. To be near Crystal was all I could expect, and the little incidents of the journey are written in my memory—if not here. It is sufficient to say that day by day she was always in sight, and, by night, when we camped, we three formed a party round one fire, while, at the instance of the chief, the four Maoris had two to themselves at a little distance. When bedtime came we rolled ourselves each in a blanket in bush style, with our feet to the fire, and slept in triangular fashion. It was sweet to lie awake, looking up at the moonlit sky between the trees, to hear Crystal’s breathing as she and Grey fell off to sleep before me. Once I heard her murmur “Mother” in her sleep, and once again she moved with a sigh and said the name of the one she loved—“Kahikatea.”